Recalling this incident I concluded that this unknown serpent, which
had been killed because it wanted to share my baby sister's rug, and
my black serpent were one and the same species--possibly they had been
mates--and that they had strayed a distance away from their native
place or else were the last survivors of a colony of their kind in our
plantation. It was not until twelve or fourteen years later that I
discovered that it was even as I had conjectured. At a distance of
about forty miles from my home, or rather from the home of my boyhood
where I no longer lived, I found a snake that was new to me, the
_Philodryas scotti_ of naturalists, a not uncommon Argentine snake,
and recognized it as the same species as the one found coiled up on my
little sister's rug and presumably as my mysterious black serpent.
Some of the specimens which I measured exceeded six feet in length.
CHAPTER XVII
A BOY'S ANIMISM
The animistic faculty and its survival in us--A boy's animism and its
persistence--Impossibility of seeing our past exactly as it was--Serge
Aksakoff's history of his childhood--The child's delight in nature
purely physical--First intimations of animism in the child--How it
affected me--Feeling with regard to flowers--A flower and my mother--
History of a flower--Animism with regard to trees--Locust-trees by
moonlight--Animism and nature-worship--Animistic emotion not
uncommon--Cowper and the Yardley oak--The religionist's fear of
nature--Pantheistic Christianity--Survival of nature-worship in
England--The feeling for nature--Wordsworth's pantheism and animistic
emotion in poetry.
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